It wasn’t exactly high-brow viewing, Channel 24’s Ikhtilaaf-e-Rai on the 12th of October. Dominated by guest Arif Hameed Bhatti, the show was exactly the sort of foaming-at-the-mouth, angry, narrow patriotism that one can expect from anything featuring Bhatti. General R Ghulam Mustafa might have been a co-panellist but Bhatti out-Faujed him by a heavy margin.
Also present was Saleem Bukhari, editor of the Nation.
Now regarding the Cyril Almeida story, the hypernationalists have a doublethink going on, as they usually do on nearly all matters. Here, they simultaneously believe that the story is fake and that the details of this secret meeting should not have been released. Whatever.
There are a couple of talking points that follow. One of them is that even if the news was leaked, Dawn shouldn’t have run it on account of it being against national interests. That it corroborated the “enemies” narrative.
Countering this argument, of course, is the argument that journalists shouldn’t be concerned about what national interest is if it interferes with the noble cause of the truth. And all that jazz.
In a spirited mood, Saleem Bukhari, egged on by Bhatti, asked the viewers whether we’d ever heard American journalists speaking out against the US’s interests (we have), whether we’d ever heard British journalists speaking out against the UK’s interests (we have), whether we’d ever heard Indian journalists speaking out on the atrocities in Kashmir (we, surprise surprise, have). Even though he might have been on a roll of being wrong, his fact-deficient argument is still a popular point of view in the country.
What made Bukhari’s views interesting was that they were the exact direct opposite of what his own paper’s editorial had forcefully — and rightly — said the day before. Discarding editorial reserve, the paper angrily asked the government to get its own act in order before passing judgment on what journalists should and shouldn’t do. Regarding enemies’ narratives, the editorial read “some of our actions and inactions as a country are indefensible – everyone knows it, no matter how much we may pretend otherwise.”
Powerful stuff.
When the host pointed out his paper’s editorial was saying something else, Bukhari said that his personal views were different from those of his paper. Which is odd. Editorials are the editor’s point of view. Yes, no one expects the editors to do the writing themselves, but that’s what they are.
Just the way all op-ed columns (like the one you are reading) are prefaced, even if implicitly, by the understanding that the views expressed are those of the columnist and not the paper, does the Nation want to have the same arrangement for the editorials themselves?
Perhaps in an upcoming program, Bukhari will be heard criticising a headline of the paper’s front-page, and then claim that it wasn’t his personal sensibilities that had informed those headlines.
Or maybe it is a classic case of having the cake and eating it, too. On TV or the Urdu press, be the hypernationalist and in the English press, where the establishment’s line is losing acceptance, be a reformist?
